1889-1964
Born in November 1889, Jawaharlal Nehru would become India’s first prime minister.
Nehru’s ancestors were Kashmiri Brahmins who had settled in Allahabad, in northern India. His father, Motilal Nehru, was a successful barrister and a prominent figure in the Indian National Congress (INC), which was established in 1885.
In 1905 Nehru was sent to England, studying first at Harrow, then at Cambridge University, and finally joining the Inner Temple and passing the Bar examinations. By 1905 the INC had begun to shift from a gradualist "moderate" politics to a more "extremist" anti-colonial stance as evinced by Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920) among others. Jawaharlal, unlike his father, found himself more in sympathy with this militant position. Nevertheless, during the years following his return to India in 1912, Nehru entered the legal profession through his father’s chambers. By 1917 he joined the Home Rule League movement guided by the "extremist" Tilak and the theosophist Annie Besant (1847-1933).
But it was events in 1919 that drove Nehru into deeper political involvement with congress’s politics under the leadership of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948). First, the colonial government decided to continue wartime ordinances into peacetime under the Rowlatt Act, which would allow the British to hold Indian political agitators without trial. Gandhi launched an all-India civil disobedience campaign in protest. Second, while support for the campaign was uneven, General Reginald Dyer’s orders on April 13 to fire without warning upon an unarmed crowd of villagers galvanized Indian opposition. The villagers, ignorant of martial law regulations, had assembled to hear speeches in the city of Amritsar. Although Dyer was dismissed from the army, the House of Lords virtually exonerated him when it passed a motion in his favor. For Nehru, this was a sign that it was time for a more assertive struggle to achieve freedom.
Nehru became an avid supporter of Gandhi and joined the non-cooperation movement launched by him in 1920. In February 1927, on a personal visit to Europe, Nehru attended the International Congress against Colonial Oppression and Imperialism held in Brussels. Here he encountered the Marxist and socialist ideas of other delegates and a few months later he was invited to the Soviet Union to join in the tenth anniversary celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution. The socialist reforms Nehru witnessed left a profound impression on him and convinced him that as another largely agrarian country with an impoverished and mostly illiterate population, India could usefully emulate the Soviet experiment.
Returning with an arsenal of ideas, Nehru urged a more comprehensive struggle against the British. His ideas involved supporting an increasingly radical peasant agitation; a distancing from the conservative landlord and industrial supporters of the congress; and reforms such as the abolition of landlordism, socialization of the land, planned economic development, and state acquisition of key industries for the future. These ideas, however, brought Nehru into disagreement with Gandhi, who feared the class struggle they would provoke might fracture Indian unity. While they continued to diverge on many of these issues, Nehru desisted from openly challenging Gandhi’s political leadership in the interests of maintaining a consolidated anti-colonial movement.
With the British "transfer of power" on August 15, 1947, Nehru became India’s prime minister. Assuming power amid the devastating violence of the partition of British India into the nation-states of India and Pakistan, Nehru left the imprint of his political ideals as he sought to steer the new country into calmer political seas. Among Nehru’s most significant legacies was to set India on the path of democracy in that elections rather than military coups produced changes of governments. Another of Nehru’s bequests was the Indian state’s adoption of the ideal of secularism, defined not as a "separation of church and state" but as the commitment by the government to treat every religion equally. There was little resistance to this principle in the aftermath of the religious violence surrounding partition and Gandhi’s assassination at the hands of a Hindu supremacist on January 30, 1948.
However, Nehru is also credited with perpetuating the colonial government’s over-centralized state structure that he had so vociferously criticized. Nearly 200 articles of the British-instituted Government of India Act of 1935 passed into the constitution of independent India. The imbalance of power between the central and provincial (called states in independent India) governments, in favor of the former, was retained as was the bureaucracy, the empire’s "steel frame." The Gandhian ideal of a non-party government with a weak center and power devolved to "village republics" was discarded in substance.
On the economic front, although Nehru had compromised earlier with Gandhi, he now sought to apply many of his socialist ideas. However, as prime minister, he also had to take into account the wide variety of demands on the state as well as India’s pre-existing capitalist economic framework. While still adhering to his principle of planned development Nehru opted for a mixed economy in which the government would only control its capital goods and strategic industries. Through a series of five-year plans, heavy industry was given priority over consumer goods manufacture, and import substitution policies were pushed to attain self-sufficiency. But these measures took their toll in that the drive for self-sufficiency further isolated India’s economy and pushed up consumer prices. State-owned industries were maintained despite their often demonstrated inefficiency while large Indian capitalists, although firmly regulated, monopolized the domestic market, often dumping substandard consumer goods on it.
With regard to land reform too, Nehru’s success is ambivalent. Among his first measures was to abolish landlordism and set land ceilings in the early 1950s. Yet the large dispossessed landlords were given compensation, and although land reforms were administered not from the center but by the states, prosperous peasant groups who dominated the Congress party at the provincial level increased the maximum acreage that could be held, to their advantage in many instances. Moreover, by exploiting loopholes in the legislations, many landlords transferred portions of their estates into the hands of family members or retainers. In the end, landless laborers benefited little from the agrarian reforms despite Nehru’s commitment to removing the economic inequity of the colonial era.
The new nation-state of India was also pulled into a world of other nation-states. Nehru’s achievements here, gaining him international renown, lay in steering India between the Scylla and Charybdis of the cold war blocs led by the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics through the principle of "Non-Alignment." A term coined by Nehru, non-alignment was a principle put into international play along with leaders such as Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970) of Egypt and Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980) of the former Yugoslavia. However, although advocating principled neutrality, Nehru’s policies were often viewed with suspicion by many political leaders and observers, especially those aligned with the Western bloc—and especially when he refused to condemn the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.
Perhaps Nehru’s gravest political crisis was his country’s defeat in the 1962 Sino-Indian war provoked by border disputes emanating from the colonial past. The conflict itself was an embarrassing repudiation of a "friendship" that purportedly began when India became the first country to recognize Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China established in 1949. Nehru was not only brutally disappointed by China’s "aggression," but for the remaining two years of his life some of Nehru’s domestic policies produced challenges to his leadership in parliament until his death on May 27, 1964.
